Digital Minimalism: Choosing a focused life in a noisy world
Book: Digital Minimalism: Choosing a focused life In a Noisy World
Author: Cal Newport
Practices:
Spend time alone. Indulge in solitude. Unfiltered reflection uninterrupted from other people’s input. Solitude is a subjective state, one can experience it in a busy cafe just as well as in the wilderness. Focus on your own thoughts and experience.
Anthony Storr, Solitude: A Return to the Self: The need to spend a great deal of time alone was common among “the majority of poets, novelists, and composers”. Descartes, Newton, Locke, Pascal, Spinoza, Kant, Leibniz, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein.
Practice leaving your phone at home
Take long walks
Write letters to yourself. Dwight Eisenhower had a practice of thinking by writing. Lincoln would record his thoughts on scraps of paper and put them under his hat.
Don’t ever click “Like”. Don’t leave social media comments and messages. These get you hooked on to continuous clicking. Also gives your information to social media companies to sell
Consolidate texting: Do your texts all together at fixed time slots
Put your phone on “Do not disturb” setting. Set up preferential call, message privileges for selected people.
Hold dedicated conversation time slots/ “office hours”: For example: let people know you’re available at 4:30 pm M-F when it’s your commute time.
Fix or build something every week. Prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption. Use skills to produce valuable things in the physical world. Seek activities that require real world, structured social interactions. Learn how to relax and unplug. Specialization is better because you can trade the extra money you make for services you need.
Schedule low quality leisure. This is time for movies, videos, social media activities. Keeps you from being distracted at other times. The vast majority of social media benefits can be had from 20-40 minutes per week.
Join something: a networking club, professional club, others
Follow leisure plan. Develop strong leisure activities to replace electronic engagement time waste
Form good habits. Doing nothing is overrated, particularly when it degrades into low-quality phone and social media engagement.
The benefits of technology depend on how you use it
Delete social media from your phone. Use social media as a professional. You do 99% of serious use on a laptop. Turn your devices into single-purpose computers.
Embrace slow media: Be more mindful in media consumption. Giving the “breaking” news a few days to mature can inform better. The concept is similar to that of “slow food”: local food and traditional cuisine as an alternative to fast food. Limit your attention to the best of the best individual writers who are reliably smart and insightful. A small amount of high-quality offerings is usually superior to a larger amount of low-quality fare. Seek out the best arguments against your preferred position. Isolate your news consumption to set times.